Some printed wiring boards have contact fingers arranged along an edge of the board for providing an electrical connection with contact positions of an edge board connector when the finger-bearing edge is inserted into the connector. One end of each contact finger is in electrical and physical contact with a circuit located on the board while the other end of the finger provides an electrical path to a particular contact position in a connector upon insertion into the connector. Thus the fingers act as electrical bridges for circuitry on the board to interact with all the remainder of the circuitry in the sytem not located on the board.
The electrical contact fingers are typically provided on a web with each finger located between two carrier strips in a bandolier fashion. The web, rolled onto a reel, is fed by a stepping motor into a punch where the fingers are removed from the carrier strips for placement onto the circuit board edge. The operation of the stepping motor and the location of the finger on the web combine to provide a tolerance of .+-.0.015 inches (0.38 mm) for positioning the severed finger on the board edge and this tolerance was sufficient for finger placement when relatively few fingers were required.
However, as components have become smaller circuit boards are being designed to hold a greater number of circuits which require a larger number of contact fingers to be placed along the edge of the board for electrical connection. Consequently fingers have become thinner with the fingers crowded together so as to be able to physically locate a larger number of fingers along the board edge. Each thinner finger must be precisely positioned on the circuit board edge to provide proper electrical connection with circuitry located on the board without touching an adjacent finger in the crowded environment. Whereas fingers can be positioned with .+-.0.015 inch tolerance using the fingers' position on the carrier as a guide, present boards, requiring positioning within .+-.0.003 inch (0.08 mm) tolerance, do not permit the same positioning technique to be used.
Thus a problem exists in that apparatus is required to sever a finger from a web which finger is not accurately located and to precisely position the finger after it has been severed.